Reviews
Kieron Tyler
In October 1964, New York’s Goldie & the Gingerbreads boarded the RMS Mauretania for Southampton. In the midst of the British Invasion, they were taking on the beat boom at its coal face. The Beatles, Animals, Dave Clark Five, Rolling Stones and more were cleaning up in their home country but – counter intuitively – Genya Zelkowitz aka Genya Ravan aka Goldie and co went in the opposite direction. Their champions in this venture were The Animals and their manager Mike Jeffrey. Rolling Stone Keith Richards also claimed to have discovered them at a New York party he’d attended with Stones’ Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It’s perhaps unfortunate that The North Water arrives on BBC Two only a few months after The Terror, since it’s impossible to avoid the parallels between them. They’re set only a few years apart (1859 for The North Water, 1845 for The Terror), both involve doomed voyages into Arctic waters, and each of them gets darker and bloodier as it depicts man’s inhumanity to man (and not just man) and the encroaching horror of a heart of darkness.But there are differences, too. The North Water is based on Ian McGuire’s novel, but this five-part series is indelibly stamped with the mark of screenwriter Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This Danish police drama attempts to tackle the country’s uneasy relationship with the immigrants it’s allowed into its cities over the last 30 years. The result is a somewhat clumsy attempt at fusing social commentary with the visceral thrills of an action movie, complete with car chases, shoot outs and muscle-bound fistfights.The title is the Arabic word for police and Shorta opens with a close up of a black teenager, Talib Ben Hassi, shouting "I can’t breathe" as he's held down on the floor by a white officer. It’s a little cheap to reference a real-life atrocity for Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
No disrespect to Sakari Oramo and his colleagues in tomorrow’s farewell jamboree, but I wonder whether this performance should have featured as the Last Night of the Proms. After all its terror, grief and sorrow, the St Matthew Passion ends with such a gentle and healing leave-taking (“Ruhe sanfte, sanfte ruh”) that it would surely capture our pandemic travails across the past two years. Not that the Arcangelo choir and players, then or at any point during Bach’s inexhaustible miracle, ever skimped on drama and impact. Once more, after last week’s spectacular with the Monteverdi Choir, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Welcome back, WNO! Yes, emphatically, and with a loud hurrah, which is precisely what the company received, and rightly received, from the somewhat arbitrarily scattered first night Millennium Centre audience for their opening revival of The Barber of Seville. But what possessed their new(ish) General Director, Aidan Lang, to celebrate the return, with all its lively hopes for the future, by digging up Giles Havergal’s 35-year-old production of Rossini’s masterpiece, is a mystery I am unable to unravel.Havergal’s stage-within-a-stage concept perhaps seemed chic and suitably postmodern in 1986 Read more ...
David Nice
You don’t expect a great orchestral string section to be born overnight, yet under the circumstances of the Proms Festival Orchestra’s rapid creation and only three rehearsals of three hours each, this was more than good, with detailed articulation demanded and delivered. You also wouldn’t have expected, until it was announced a few weeks back, a big Mahler symphony in a slimmed-down Proms season.What a cause for celebration beyond the sheer feat of freelance musicians coming together, many after a long performing silence (which also meant, mostly, Mahler’s too). What we should perhaps call “ Read more ...
Marianka Swain
Let it snow! The Broadway musical adaptation of the Disney film behemoth Frozen premiered back in 2018 and now, following Covid delays, a rejigged version finally makes its home in the West End – to the delight of the army of miniature Elsas in attendance. The good news is that there’s plenty here to keep grown-ups entertained as well.The show faithfully adheres to the film plot – as, indeed, it must to avoid a riot – but Jennifer Lee’s book adds more psychological depth to Elsa and Anna (Samantha Barks and Stephanie McKeon), and addresses, if doesn’t quite solve, the dramaturgical issue of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Adapted from Ferdinand von Schirach’s bestselling 2011 novel, The Collini Case is a riveting mix of character study and legal drama, carefully blended into a historical perspective reaching forward 60 years from the 1940s. At its core is the so-called Dreher Law, a sinister legacy from the Nazi era which, cunningly evading democratic scrutiny in Germany’s Bundestag, was a device for erasing murders committed under the Third Reich from the records.Directed with sensitivity and acuity by Marco Kreuzpaintner, the story is seen through the eyes of Caspar Leinen (Elyas M’Barek), a naive young Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Is it a thriller? Is it a character study? Leopards, Alys Metcalf’s two-hander about a middle-aged white charity executive – male – and a young job applicant of mixed race – female – goes under the colours of both, but falls short of either genre.A windy retread of a thesis with which few could safely disagree nowadays (let’s say – leopards don’t change their spots, especially male white salaried ones), it makes an underwhelming opener for Christopher Haydon’s tenure of the Rose Theatre, Kingston.Requested by the publicity team not to reveal the final twist of the 90-minute drama, I can Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
"I've seen things you people wouldn’t believe." It’s one of the most famous lines from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, though in the past 18 months we’ve all seen things we would not have believed back at the start of 2020, when I originally secured my tickets for this show that had been scheduled for 26 March 2020.Set in 2019, Scott’s version of that year correctly foretold issues arising from overpopulation and the climate crisis, though instead of synthetic humans and flying cars, real-life 2019 saw the advent of a deadly virus and an ensuing global lockdown from which the UK Read more ...
Saskia Baron
It’s a little hard to tell if this film was really intended for an international release, given that its heart is so set on making Polish movie-goers proud of their countrymen. The Champion of Auschwitz recounts the true story of Tadeusz "Teddy" Pietrzykowski, a young bantamweight boxing champion from Warsaw who in 1940 was captured by the occupying Nazis as he tried to join the Polish army in France.He was one of the first wave of political prisoners sent to Auschwitz, who were used as slave labour to reconfigure the old Polish army barracks into a death camp. Pietrzykowski survived the Read more ...
Gary Naylor
Even if you miss the play’s title and do not recognise the writer’s name with the heft of reputation that comes with it, as soon as you see the black man and the white woman speaking in South African accents, you know that the tension that electrifies the air between them is real. "No normal sport in an abnormal society” was the rally cry of those boycotting the Apartheid regime, but there was no normal love, either – until, incredibly, the mid-80s. Yes, the mid-80s.Diane Page’s revival of Athol Fugard’s Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act at the Orange Tree Theatre howls Read more ...